


Johnson

by ArdeaWrites



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Black Mesa is a death trap, Gen, Johnson POV, Mute Gordon Freeman, Physics of the Crowbar continuity, Security Guard Hijinks, The Gman looks out for his favorites, The Spy in the Sewer and How He Got There, Watch me retconn in Cross & Green, and lots of doughnuts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-10
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:33:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27986217
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: Johnson had never heard of anyone successfully stealing intellectual property from Black Mesa before but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been tried. He’d heard of lots of tries. Whatever was going on under the New Mexico desert it was worth millions to rival Horizon Labs; a paycheck big enough to take the risk. But who had knocked off his fellow spies, the company, the coworkers, or the laboratory itself? And what on earth were they doing with that hazard suit?
Comments: 20
Kudos: 29





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Physics of the Crowbar](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18156932) by [ArdeaWrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites). 



> What I was writing when I was supposed to be writing Stray Physicists but wanted to play in this universe instead! You don't need to have read Physics of the Crowbar, this is just a tangentially-related bit with an OC from that story. Johnson appears in chapter 16 of Crowbar and gets referenced a time or two later on but that's it.

  
  


The uniform fit, badly. How did these people put up with a synthetic cloth in a humid cave under a sweltering desert? _I should get hazard pay for this._ And the vest wasn’t much better. He adjusted the straps so it fit correctly and wouldn’t ride up. Most of the guards were wearing them wrong, too tight or floppy loose. 

Speaking of his new coworkers… He eyed the lineup in the locker room; these people were his enemy, technically, but they were such a mix of glad-to-be-retired cops, military washouts, desert locals and spotty kids he couldn’t bring himself to take them too seriously. 

Some jobs, the security locker room was the most dangerous place. Everyone looking over their own shoulder and testing each other’s stories, the official measuring contest of the marksmanship rankings and and the unofficial contests-in and out of uniform, on and off the clock-where a man out of place would get himself caught with a word. _You served in Iraq? Which company? You know So-and-So? No? That’s strange, he led that company. Tell me your name again? You said you were with the Blue Group at that R &D place in Alabama? My cousin works there. Funny he never mentioned you. _

But all these guys wanted to know was his thoughts on the two local competing doughnut chains, if he was going to be a real challenger in the Black Mesa Security Fitness Contest, and if he wanted to bid on a page in the department charity calendar. 

He preferred the place on 2ND & Cactus Street, that sold a pink frosted doughnut with caramel bacon sprinkles; he would place within the upper 25% in the fitness contest, respectable but unsurprising; he’d politely support the charity calendar but would not be appearing in its pages, thanks. 

_But Jorge’s been September for ten years and he just retired and none of the guys here want to follow that act. Come on man, we need a fresh face!_

No. 

Not for the most heart-tugging charity project on the planet would his face be appearing in a printed publication. Being in the employee database was bad enough. Every entry a liability, calculated against his future worth as an independent contractor. 

He’d worked hard to cultivate lifelong anonymity. If all went as planned, he’d serve out his time in the blue plastic suit and Black Mesa would never know he was here. 

Maybe one of these mall cops would remember him as some guy named Johnson from southern Wisconsin, used to work security for a dairy cooperative until he developed an allergy to cows. _Yeah, I get a breakout every time I get licked by a cow now. Had to come all the way out here to escape em!_ But not likely. 

A spy wasn’t supposed to be memorable. 

  


\---

  


The mission was, on paper, simple. 

Find the Hazardous Environment Suit. Bring back samples of the carbon underlayer (rumored to be an energized, programmable carbon fiber nanotube arrangement) and the protective plating (rumored to be a cutting-edge polymer lattice 3D-printed then kiln-fired to a tough, durable, radiation-shielding semi-crystalline state) and, if possible, a copy of the integrated programming (rumored to be an advanced biometric/medical suite capable of autonomous diagnostics and treatment.) 

Simple. 

Black Mesa was allegedly raking in billions in military and private sector contracts for their advanced metamaterials, everything from new forms of tank plating to new forms of rocket fuel, but the stuff the HEV was made of wasn’t hitting their usual contract markets. If it existed, really physically existed outside a PowerPoint presentation in an R&D pipe-dream, they were keeping it awfully close to the chest. 

And that begged the question, the question Horizon Labs was willing to pay him six figures to answer: why? 

Why pour millions or more, and years of research and development, into a product you aren’t selling? 

_Because the product doesn’t exist,_ went the popular train of thought. 

_Because the product is just an asset to the production of something more valuable,_ went an entirely different train of thought. 

Either way, Horizon had an itch that would be nicely scratched by a little “inspiration” from Black Mesa’s polymer laboratories. 

Johnson wasn’t new to the game. 

He’d wandered the halls of two universities as an adjunct professor and collected up the combined research of a slew of brilliant young doctoral candidates (not like the universities would ever let students patent or publish.) He’d stolen blueprints for a quantum supercomputer from a quasi-military installation in Florida (they’d stolen them from a Japanese tech lab first, and Johnson was just leveling the playing field by selling them to a Nigerian royal. A real one who had paid in gold.) He’d walked out of a medical research facility in Russia with samples of artificial bone grown on a hand-carved calcite lattice and embedded with the recipient’s own DNA (four hospitals in India had pooled their resources to buy that job.) And he still had, embedded above his left elbow, a microchip containing the formula for the world’s most efficient organic rocket fuel, developed in UAE fishponds. He had a buyer waiting for him in Jerusalem. 

But he’d gotten a tip that someone on the far side had an idea who he was, and then Horizon had contacted him about this job. The combination of being literally underground and also making a paycheck was rather appealing at the moment. 

Black Mesa was a little deeper underground than he’d anticipated, he thought, as he looked up at the raw red stone ceiling arching three stories above his head. 

He wasn’t new to the game, but Black Mesa was another kind of player altogether. 

Old, twisting, dangerous. Its guards were a handwave to convention; the real danger was the facility itself and, as his belt Geiger counter pinged a warning, the decades of research they’d already abandoned here. 

He’d never heard of anyone successfully stealing intellectual property from Black Mesa before, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been tried. He’d heard of lots of tries. 

The tram line turned a corner; below, the pooled nuclear coolant shimmered radium green. 

  


\---

  


Johnson was fifty percent of a two-man team. His other half was installed safely and respectably on floor forty-seven of an insurance tower in Chicago, complete with a business card and gilded lettering on the door. “J. Johnson Acquisitions.” The first J stood for Jerome. 

They’d argued about it. About Black Mesa, the potential for disaster. 

_“Listen, I know you’re one of the best but don’t take this job.” Jerome toyed with the handgun clips on his desk. Monogrammed, like the gun they fit. They’d been a gift._

_“Why not? No external security networks, no external internet access. It’s a surveillance black hole. No one’s going to hack in and find me there. If I can’t pull off the job I’ll play cop for a few months then quit when our friends in the oil fields get bored.”_

_“People in our line of work tend to vanish in there, Johnson. Lowland, Simpson and Squires all tried in the last two years. No one’s heard from them since.”_

_“Maybe they’re still in there.” Johnson smirked but he sensed the worry in Jerome’s voice. And in a business built on lies and theft, that subtle tone was worth more than all the secrets he’d ever stolen. Jerome was afraid for him._

_“Maybe there’s a reason there’s no external surveillance.”_

_“I appreciate your paranoia on my behalf, but there’s a price out for a head that looks a lot like a low-resolution photocopy of my passport photo. I’ll take the chance on Black Mesa not having seen that yet.” Any other job and he’d have bowed to Jerome’s wisdom, but the combined bounty and tantalizing Horizon paycheck made Black Mesa look like a Cayman Islands beachside resort._

_“Alright, if you’re set on this I can’t stop you, but be careful. Please. Stay in contact, don’t drop off the radar. At least every seventy-two hours or I’ll be looking for a new partner.”_

_“I’ll be good. And you call me when they give up on that ridiculous bounty. And don’t worry so much, grey isn’t your color.”_

_“Shut up.”_

Jerome had given him the P226 “As a reminder not to tempt luck.” 

No one needed weapons in IP theft. If a bullet entered business, business was long over. 

But the gun felt good, its weight pleasant in its harness. He always liked jobs where he could carry without suspicion. He had the company-issue Glock 17 on his hip, part of the uniform, but the P226 lived under the thin black coat and over the bulletproof vest. 

A little insurance. Maybe a bit of a security blanket too, if he was being honest. 

There were a lot of dark tunnels, unlit rooms, boarded-up windows in Black Mesa. A lot of places that made the hair on his neck stand on end, made his Geiger counter tick, made him think of all the names he knew who had come this way before. 

  


\---

  


Jerome might have been right.

Two guards were missing. 

He would have bet half the Horizon paycheck on them being plain old ordinary day guards and not at all in his line of work, which made their disappearances on the clock more ominous by comparison. He fully expected Black Mesa to have its own in-house cleaning service for people like himself; he didn’t expect them to utterly ignore the probable deaths of two workday employees. 

And that was, apparently, exactly what they did. 

Two names were removed from the lockers forty-eight hours after they failed to clock off. A cursory search was made, notes were sent to next of kin, a two-hour safety review found “no probable cause for suspicion.” 

Two new hires were made, a lanky kid from the town RV park and a woman whose face made the cavern walls look like polished marble. 

_No one’s heard from them since._

He wondered how many others had “failed to clock off.” 

“Too many, but you know, it’s a big place,” Chambers said as they split a doughnut (with blueberry frosting; Chambers preferred the other place on Tumbleweed Avenue) and coffee on their fifteen-minute shift break. 

“Do the families ever wonder what happened?” 

Chambers shrugged. He was a neckless brick of a man, lazy and genial, like an old bulldog. He’d been a marine in a very distant youth. “Not my job. Ain’t been me yet, and I been here eight years. If you survive your first year or so you don’t have to worry much. It’s mostly new guys who go missing, kids who wander off the route. Things like that. You learn your route and watch where you’re going and not over your shoulder, you don’t have any trouble.” 

Learn the route. Stay in your lane, don’t ask questions, don’t tempt luck. 

Don’t look over your shoulder. 

Terrible advice for a spy. 

  


\---

  


“Why do you think you need to know?” Calvin demanded, when he asked the shift supervisor for the security route map for his shift and floor. 

Dangerous ground, to be making people ask questions, but every good heist required blueprints. “Alright, honestly, I made a bet with Derreckson that the whole of our shift’s routes are twice as far as his shift. If I’m right and we’re working twice as hard, his shift will spring for pizza and we get to redraw the route map.” 

Calvin grunted. “Pizza?” 

“Real pizza, not the cafeteria crap. Fresh. Delivery. You can smell it now, sir. And you know I’m right.” 

The route map was revealing, in what it did not reveal. Johnson had a good head for three-dimensional spaces. He’d wanted to be an architect, as a kid. Had spent hours drawing plans for Lego towers and treehouses with myriad interior spaces and secret passages. 

That’s what made him good at his job now. Companies knew what people wanted but didn’t want to pay for and they buried it deep in the center of their labyrinths. Glass and mirrors for jewelers, vaults and codes for banks, miles of halls and a fortress of airlock double doors, each requiring its own retinal scanner and code, for high-security government-contract labs. 

Black Mesa had all that, officially, but it had more. A second labyrinth inside the walls. Vacant levels. Dark halls. Unused laboratories. Decommissioned tram lines. Miles of pipework big enough to drive through, all of it just outside their fluorescent-lit white tile security beat. 

Now that he knew where to look, he started seeing the intersections with that dark labyrinth. Bland steel doors with no markings and oddly advanced touchpad locks. Sealed-off viewing mezzanines, their windows painted black. Solid new walls of electronics humming softly and smelling of silicon, their readouts useless gibberish. No one ever entered that labyrinth except, he was willing to bet, curious, tired or lost security guards and over-eager corporate spies. 

And then they never came back. 

  


\---

  


White-coated scientists, 90% male, 65% over fifty years old, held the top of Black Mesa’s social pyramid. They casually cut in line in the cafeteria and bought up all the best sandwiches, commandeered shiny new office supplies and refused to hold elevator doors open for anyone not in their tier. 

Johnson had only casual contact with Horizon’s personnel but they’d never been this consistently rude towards him, faceless independent contractor that he was. As he drifted in ever-tightening circles towards the high-security laboratories and their dark labyrinth shadow-spaces, a few faces hovering above starched and spotless coats began becoming familiar. 

Half a dozen men and women, younger than the average. More equally distributed across the gender spectrum. More willing to speak out, and speak up. The glances he got from them weren’t disinterested bland arrogance, they were cutting glares of warning. 

_Step back. You shouldn’t be here. Don’t watch us. This isn’t your place. Go guard something else. No doughnuts here._

“Don’t let them get to you,” Calhoun advised. He was manning the guard checkpoint at the polymer lab. 

“They seem a little uptight.” 

“You would be too.” He looked up from his magazine. “They don’t get much time out of this place. Mesa’s got them on a ridiculous schedule. You stay here long enough, you’ll start to develop pet favorites. Follow their projects, bet on the funding awards, that kind of thing.” 

“Huh. Sounds like you don’t get out much either.” 

Calhoun laughed. “I don’t. Night pay is too good.” 

“So who’s your favorite?” 

“Me, I’m watching this guy Freeman. He runs a resonance lab in there with the polymer stuff but he’s tagging in with robotics a lot these days. He won me the betting pot on last year’s funds awards, was a dark horse with some pitch about crystal resonant theory. Guys thought it sounded too much like chakras but if he pulls it off it’ll be global instant communication. Or so goes the theory.” 

“Or so goes the theory.” Johnson repeated it like a mantra. How often he’d heard that. “What’s Freeman do when he isn’t winning you money?” 

“Good question. Works days in his lab and nights with robotics, developing all their new mascot outfits. He sleeps on the tram line between shifts.” 

Dangerous waters, Johnson thought. Either Calhoun was a little bit of an enthusiast, or he was baiting Johnson into revealing more than he should know. 

_Play it safe._ “I’ll keep an eye out for him then. Can’t wait to see this mascot suit. What’s that all about?” 

“Ha. It’s this neon orange football uniform they’re trialing for disaster cleanup. I don’t think we’re supposed to know about it but sometimes a guy’s gotta take a leak, you know? Saw him all dressed up in the crapper a couple weeks back. You can’t miss him. Tall skinny guy with a goatee and silent as the grave. Walks like he owns the place. Don’t get in his way.” 

  


\---

  


They found a body. 

Not one of the missing guards, not a recent one. An old body, stripped to tendon and bone, teeth grinning in the skull. 

Johnson saw it pulled from the bottom of a dark greasy drain pit below the level six tram station, watched bits slough off into the swamp, and wondered which of his colleagues it was and what kind of "workplace accident" had left the ring of holes in the skull. 

  


\---

  


The robotics labs were not on his beat but they were close enough for a casual flyby. They were in the warm, well-lit core of Black Mesa’s R&D space, where nice proper marketable mechanical robotics were invented by the bucketload. 

Tech positively ancient, if the hazard suit’s capabilities were as rumored. 

He knew the thing existed now, and not just because Calhoun had seen someone wearing it in the bathroom. He’d started finding bits of it floating around in the laboratory currents, flotsam drifting from one project to the next. Special gloves used for handling hot metamaterials. Bio-monitoring inside the hazmat suits in the nuclear testing areas. Freshly-woven bolts of carbon fiber cloth. Shiny new charging stations. All Horizon’s suspicions seemed proven correct: not only had Black Mesa developed its own toy, it was using said toy, which would have revolutionized any number of tech fronts from war to medicine to deep-sea exploration, to push its own boundaries. 

But Black Mesa sat under a rock in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. 

They had no deep-water apparatus. No core-drilling rigs, no launch pads, and no aspirations towards such that he could find. And they weren’t selling to the military. Legally or illegally. Or someone would have cried foul by now. 

Just what were they doing with the thing? 

Retinal scanners could be fooled with a laser-etched contact lens. Touch-pads could be fooled with a 3D-printed fingerprint pad. And they were fooled, (thanks to a small office event in which two physicists and a polymer labs tech discovered their startlingly low tolerance for bourbon and chocolate doughnuts in combination,) long enough for him to walk away with a finger-plate from a glove and a one-inch-square swatch of carbon fiber cloth. 

Tiny enough to hide. Tiny enough to go unnoticed. 

Success. 

Almost. 

He’d seen something else in that lab, something that gave him pause. 

A dark red hazard suit, unfinished, in pieces, hanging on an equipment rack. 

Sixteen more empty equipment racks lined up along the walls. 

And a heavily-armored remote control all-terrain cart containing crates of damaged parts. That in and of itself wasn’t unusual; they were probably taking them out into the desert somewhere and throwing them off a cliff for impact testing. But the cart had gray sticky mud on the wheels, mud unlike anything he’d seen around Black Mesa. He took a sample of it too, because it smelled funny, organic, almost like compost. Strange. 

Very strange. 

  


\---

  


_“About that bounty.”_

He was sitting on the roof of the security dorms, watching the search lights play across the desert floor. Coyotes yapped and sang in the darkness. 

“Did they give up yet?” 

_“No. They increased it by half a million. Still the same old photo though. Maybe grow your hair out, glue on a moustache. How’s work?”_

“Boring. But the money’s nice.” 

_“Ha. They pay you enough to cover your doughnut habit?”_

“Almost. Hey, I’m just about ready to wrap it up here but something’s strange.” 

_“Johnson, do not investigate off the books. You aren’t paid to be curious. You’re paid to deliver, and you don’t get paid if you’re dead.”_

“Is the Mesa into anything off-shore, or off-site anywhere? Any drilling projects or deep cave exploration? This tech is way beyond anything they need for operations here.” 

_“Not that anyone in our circles is aware of, or we’d be crawling all over it. Why?”_

“This suit is a bobble-head short of moon-walk-capable. They’re using it for glorified oven mitts in the hot labs but they have dozens of these things in play. I just can’t figure out _where_. Whatever it is, they’re either gambling big, or already getting paid the GDP of a few small countries to cover development costs.” 

Jerome was silent on the other end. 

“You still there?” 

_“I don’t like this, Johnson. We don’t know enough. You’ve fulfilled your end of the bargain so get out of there. Walk away.”_

“Ok, alright, but this is big, whatever it is.” 

_“And it’s big enough to be worth killing you for, and I like you in one piece. Walk away. Horizon will cut the check and that’ll pay for a nice Swiss chalet until our oil friends find a new hobby.”_

Jerome was right. Johnson knew he was, but the image of the bins of damaged parts and all those empty racks rankled him. Black Mesa was up to something. 

And he was going to find out what, just before he walked out the doors and clocked off forever. 

  


\---

  


Wearing a blue inform got him a pass anywhere within his rounds, and just about anywhere outside of them provided he could conn the pass-codes out of a coworker. And all security coworkers the world around took payment in sugar, alcohol, caffeine and restaurant gift-cards. 

“My ex sent me these. I can’t decide if she’s trying to get back together or trying to twist the knife a little deeper. Sent a card too, ‘take your next girl there, and think of me.’” 

“That’s just cruel.” 

“I know. Hey, you want them? They’re only good for Tuesdays and Fridays.” 

“Aw man, I would but I’m not off until Sunday.” 

“Hey I’ll cover your shift Friday. Take your woman out. Put these to good use.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Heck yeah, I’m never going to use them.” 

“Thanks! We haven’t been out to a place this nice in years. Means a lot.” 

“Oh hey, before you go, can I get the codes for the engine labs? That’s your beat, right?” 

“Sure, sure. I’ll tell my supervisor you’re on it for me, she won’t care. Here, let me write them down for you. There’s six.” 

Six codes. That’d get him through the vehicle labs into fuel development, and from there to detergents, and that backed up to anomalous materials, and those labs led into the chambers behind the robotics and polymer labs where the HEV parts were manufactured. It wasn’t the regular labs he was interested in, it was the “decommissioned” spaces behind them. The shadow labs. 

Wherever those suits were going, they weren’t getting there by the usual route. 

  


\---

  


Johnson clocked off, but he didn’t walk out. He made his way back down to the engine labs, through the maze of corridors and branching back halls to as close to robotics as he could get. 

There was a door to a storage closet that backed up to a greyed-out area on the map. The closet had once been the blind entry to women’s locker room, rendered obsolete by the general lack of women. The door on the inner side had no handle and took some careful fiddling with a set of lock picks and a strong earth magnet, but he got it open. 

The bathroom was stripped down to bare plumbing, the only light the red glow of a forgotten exit sign. Conduit and heavy cords dangled from the shadows above the splintered drop-ceiling. He was reasonably certain they were disconnected, but not certain enough to risk a nasty shock. 

The cords looked oddly wet. He could have sworn one of them twitched. 

Mysteries for another day. Overflowing toilet upstairs, maybe. 

The locker room had three doors. One to the closet he’d come in by, one to an outer hall near a defunct tram platform, and one to the ready area for a previous generation of laboratory. 

The “decommissioned” lab was blocked off with steel and cinder-block but there were air vents. 

He balanced precariously on a stripped control panel and peered through. No question who he was if someone happened to spot him. 

_“People in our line of work tend to vanish in there.”_ Jerome would kill him if he got caught being such a stereotype, but each sector had its own internal security network stored on a local server with zero external connection. It was literally unhackable. If he wanted to find out what was going on, he’d have to see it with his own two eyes. 

Voices. Two women, discussing test results. 

“Good, but could be better.” 

“You say that every single day. Give the man a break, he’s clearly not cut out for the physical challenge.” 

“Then he should trade with someone who is.” 

A sigh. “Where are we going to find another subject who would put up with all this?” 

“Good point. He _is_ gaining stamina. Slowly.” 

“Yeah, at this rate he shouldn’t have to worry about dying young of a heart attack. His scores do get marginally better with practice. But we can’t push it too hard; he’s still the bright young thing up in the resonance labs. I don’t think we have the budget to buy them a new one if we break him.” 

“It’s all his design. If he breaks he’s got no one to blame but himself. To his credit, he’s pushing this project forward faster than Anomalous can keep up. They haven’t asked for a new suit in two weeks. The last batch must be holding up alright for them. I don’t like the way the back plating locked up today though, I think we can get another few degrees of movement on that joint. Go pull out that model 3.8 or whatever, the one he left here on Tuesday. I want to take a look.” 

They wheeled out a rack with a fully assembled HEV, and Johnson suppressed a whistle. It was tangerine-orange and black, the exact opposite of any useful military colors. More like something for hazardous waste disposal. Maybe Black Mesa was just investing in their own toxic dumping problem. 

But somehow he doubted it. 

He watched them disassemble the suit and reassemble it half a dozen times, watched them test each segment’s self-repair capability and adjust the carbon fiber weave. The joint finally modified to their satisfaction, they put the whole project away and clocked off. 

The lab went dark. 

Johnson checked his watch; he needed to clock on in twenty minutes. 

  


\---

  


“What’s this anomalous materials stuff all about?” he asked. Stupid bold, but then sometimes the obvious new-guy question was the best question. 

Chambers grunted and wiped frosting off his moustache. “Heck if I know. Maybe breeding toads or something.” 

“Toads?” 

“Yeah. One of the guys found a toad down there the other day. Blue, with a great big red eye. Darndest looking critter. Don’t know what it’s good for, but it sure scared the crap out of Jenkins when Calhoun left it in his locker. Ha! That was a good one.” 

He kept asking. The answers were highly varied. 

“Anomalous materials? Eh, probably drugs.” 

“Programmable fluids, I think.” 

“I’m betting they get funding for their anti-gravity car next year. I can’t wait for those to hit the market.” 

“If I told you I’d have to kill you.” 

“The third best doughnut in town.” 

“A contact grease that won’t gum up or go to slime in the heat, I hope. I had to fix the level six phone switchboard last week. I still have that gunk in my hair.” 

“They’re trying to reverse-engineer alien technology recovered from the spaceship buried under Black Mesa.” 

“First rule of anomalous materials: No one talks about anomalous materials.” 

  


\---

  


They found another body. 

This one was a pile of red bones and crushed skull, pulled in a heap from an HVAC maintenance access. How long it had been there and whose it was, no one could say. The bones were splintered and twisted, crushed as if by force. If he'd been told the remains had been fed to a lion, he'd have believed it.

And yet he felt no eyes on him, no suspicious guards, no sound of other feet on his evening rounds. Whoever was cleaning up the threats to Black Mesa's priceless inventions, they were either very, very good or they didn't exist at all.

He shivered as he stepped over an invisible crossroads. Dark rubber wheel marks marred the checked tile floor, running cross-ways to the corridor he followed, appearing as if by magic from under an apparently solid wall and vanishing into a decommissioned elevator shaft on the other side. Something scratched inside the wall, made a rodent-like squeak. Johnson backed away and kept walking, and didn't look over his shoulder.

  


  


\---

  


He saw the toad. 

Calhoun had it in a terrarium in his locker. “I’m feeding it raw hamburger and mealworms. I think it’s a subterranean species, it seems to like the dark.” 

  


\---

  


A hazard suit designed to fix itself and withstand extreme temperatures and radiation. Heavy robotic carts with fresh un-desert-like mud. A lab shrouded in secrecy and a list of MIA guards. And an impossibly exotic animal in an impossible place. 

It was too much to even imagine. 

Had the great white whale of all physicists’ dreams finally been harpooned? 

  


\---

  


_“Please tell me you’re done.”_

“Almost.” 

_“Curiosity killed the cat and it’s gonna come gunning for a Johnson here next.”_

“I think I know what they’re up to but you’re never going to believe me.” 

_“We get paid to steal other people’s hypotheses, not to sit around making up our own!”_

“I know, I know. I just need a little more time to prove it. When this hits it’s going to be huge.” 

_“Or it’ll go splat, like your sorry ass when it finds the bottom of whatever pit they throw you in. Come home, man. I don’t like this at all.”_

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  


“Keep your head down, got a shark in the halls today,” Calvin said when Johnson clocked in. 

“Do I get a spear gun?” 

“No. Word is there’s a big man in to observe some big tests coming up, so keep your distance and do your job. Also I got your two weeks’ notice letter. Heading west?” 

“Yeah. My sister’s got a place in Seattle and she’ll need some help moving cross-country. Family first, you know?” 

“I know. Good man, helping out family. Best of luck with that, and welcome to the first day of your last days. Ha! That’s ominous.” 

Johnson matched Calvin’s dry rattling laugh. Jerome had threatened to show up in-person and fabricate a family emergency if Johnson didn’t get a move-on and detach from Black Mesa. He had plenty for Horizon, enough to fulfill his end of the bargain and make ends meet in comfort until he could sell the biofuel formula. 

Dawn of the final days. Home stretch. 

Big tests. Sharks. 

_Don’t look over your shoulder._ Better spies than him had been snagged on their way out the door, just because they flinched on the threshold and looked back. 

  


\---

  


“Who’s the shark?” he asked Chambers. 

“Government man, probably. You’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em. Walk like they’re worth a million bucks. Don’t make eye contact and they won’t bother you, but they catch you side-eying and you’ll know why they call ‘em sharks. Me, I seen ‘em come and go. Seen us come and go too. Now speaking of which, you leaving us so soon?” 

News traveled fast. “Yeah. Got a sister I gotta go help, it’s gonna take a couple weeks to get her settled and I’ll look for something out on the coast.” 

“You two close?” 

“It’s family, you know?” 

“My family’s on the other side of the country and that’s the way we like it,” he grunted. “Still though. Glad to see you leave in one piece, you know what I mean? Send me a Christmas card or something, so I know you’re out.” 

“Not just a name scraped off a locker?” 

Chambers didn’t make eye-contact. “Seen a few too many of ‘em, maybe. Or wondered. Sometimes, you know people clock out, or you hope they do, or they just don’t show up again. I don’t want to be wondering if the next one they find in the sewer is you.” 

“Thanks, Chambers. That’s the nicest thing anyone here has ever said to me.” 

“Yeah, well you’re the only partner who paid his half of the doughnut tab.” 

  


\---

  


Ten days. Jerome was antsy and Johnson was catching it himself but patience would serve their purpose. Close it out right, make HR happy, and when they get around to wondering why Horizon was suddenly a competitor, they wouldn’t be looking for the guy who crossed all his Ts. 

He saw the shark. Jerome would have called him a stupid-suit. Man who wore an expensive getup off the rack, never got it tailored and cleaned properly. Those kind were tricky marks. Wealthy, insolent, arrogant, trying too hard to be part of a richer world, thought they could buy their way in with taxpayer money. 

_This one’s a sharp one._ The shark slid past in a private tramcar. Sharper than they usually came when dressed that badly. He didn’t look back but he felt the man’s eyes him until the tram turned the corner. 

And suddenly he was very glad he had an exit date nailed down. 

_You’re being watched._

  


\---

  


_“I’ll have a car for you in town. You got the coordinates?”_

“Yeah. Not too conspicuous, I don’t want to be the guy who drove out of Dodge in a red mustang.” 

_“Not on my insurance! Pilot will be there. He’s one of our people. Sorry it’s so far out but they wouldn’t land any closer to the Mesa. Apparently it’s bad luck to fly over it.”_

“Can’t imagine why,” he said dryly. Six days, and he’d be back to the world of real weather. They’d both head to the coast—the part about Seattle wasn’t a lie—and meet up with the Horizon contact. And then into Canada to wait out the UAE watchmen. 

He could last six days. 

And maybe he’d finally confirm his suspicions. _Don’t get sloppy now,_ but if he was right, if he was _right,_ the world was going to change forever. Maybe it had been changing a long time, and the tide was rising fast enough to push it over the edge. _Sharks in the water, sharks in the halls._ Big fancy financial predators circling the best and brightest minds. 

At least when he stole secrets they became less secret, not more. 

  


\---

  


Three days to go, counting down hours, and the hair on his neck on end, every nerve frayed. 

_Watched._ By whom? Sweat on his spine, under the plastic shirt. The P226 a lead weight on his back. His palms damp with anticipation. Every instinct he had screaming at him to run. 

Hold position, walk, don’t run. Spies died when they panicked. _Watch where you’re going, not over your shoulder._ He was too good to lose his cool now, but something was coming. People were moving fast, bright orange HEV parts circling in the maelstrom of activity. No one quite knew what it all meant, though. Black Mesa was playing its cards too close for even its own people to read. 

  


\---

  


And then the tension broke with a scream of steel and stench of electrical fire; the whale rolled in the deep, dragging the ship down with it. What were the richest government sharks to the power of an angered universe? 

It knocked him off his feet, opened the floor under him. 

He spent two hours clinging to a broken ladder, listening to the screams. 

His first thought was _earthquake,_ but the shaking didn’t stop. Then _nuclear meltdown,_ something catastrophically wrong with the generators or an explosion in the hot labs, but his Geiger counter wasn’t yelling anywhere near loud enough for that. Then he thought _sabotage,_ but from whom? 

Black Mesa had woken up all on its own, realized its potential for chaos and shook off the chains of OSHA review boards and shareholder dividends. The walls twisted and crumpled around him, and he fell from ladder to landing. And then the fabric of space shimmered and opened, a two-dimensional touchpoint folding out into a four-dimensional gateway. A _tesseract._ And the thing that stepped through was not human. 

Nor could it fly. The gateway was too high up the shaft, and the thing fell. 

_Splat._

The moment of manic hilarity passed and he started climbing down. The shaft breathed around him with a hot organic stink. 

_I was right, I was right, I was right,_ but small consolation if he died with his knowledge. The tesseract, the folding of space and time to create one projected, twinned point between two otherwise disparate locations, was the unicorn from which many a physicist’s sanity had been thrown. Black Mesa having managed it was surprising; Black Mesa having lost control of it, less so, in hindsight. They hadn’t exhibited very good control of nuclear technology and _that_ had been around for twice his lifetime. 

The tide had become a tidal-wave, and he had lingered at its shores too long. 

  


\---

  


Black Mesa was deep. Its bowels were choked with secrets, weapons, dangerous and deadly experiments. Black Mesa was hungry. It roared, it devoured, it opened itself to war. He found more dead, new dead and old dead. Things that were no longer human. 

They tried to kill him, so he put the Glock and the P226 to work and kept himself alive. _Unknown organics. Pharmaceutical potential, biochemical gold mine. Extraterrestrial, apparently. Who am I to judge?_ But business was concluded, and though he collected what samples he could, he wanted out. 

_You were right, I should have come home._

He kept climbing down, worming his way through the tunnels and silos and forgotten places until he found a relic, a corner of civilization. Cold war era, heavy with dust, old manuals written on type-writers and unspooled eight-millimeter film. 

He killed the things living there and pocketed more samples of tissue and blood. They lived in a special compartment inside the bulletproof vest, now one panel less impervious. It had seemed like a great idea back when the most dangerous things in Black Mesa were the jalapeño-basil prank doughnuts that occasionally appeared in the break room. Now, he sincerely hoped no one decided to shoot him in the chest. 

No cell service but he recorded messages anyway, hoping they’d be sent someday. Risked unsecure texts to tell Jerome what had happened. 

_“Black Mesa speared the whale but capsized the ship. True interdimensional travel. Seems they’re having trouble reeling it in. Mechanized sample collection and a HEV that’ll stand up to whatever’s on the far side, but seems the neighbors don’t appreciate the intrusion anymore.”_

The P226 was out of bullets. 

The walls trembled, dust and cobwebs falling like dirty snow. The sluggish river swelled with sewage released from upstream tank breaches. His Geiger counter bleated as the radioactive content increased to hazardous levels. 

_Patience._ Spies were their own sort of scientists, students and masters of human nature and behavior and situational awareness. When the shaking ceased and he could be certain of his feet, he’d get out of the sewer and into the desert. Call Jerome for pickup. Walk away. 

_Should have walked away yesterday._

  


\---

  


The flash of orange in the dirty river. At first he thought maybe scrap HEV parts washed down through the sewer, but then the fingers caught the edge and the man pulled himself up from the filthy water. The suit was battered and the man unsteady, but he was a living familiar face and he was wearing Johnson’s prize. 

“Hey you alright? You look like you could use some help. Wait, don’t shoot, I’m on your side.” The name, the man had a name. Tall, skinny, silent. “You’re Freeman, right?” Sometimes names made people suspicious. _How do you know me? How dare you know me?_ A risk, but the gun was already wavering in his direction. 

Sometimes names made people feel safe. The gun lowered, fractionally. The man couldn’t see, he realized, and was just aiming at the sound of his voice. He kept talking, so Freeman would know where he was until he got the glasses cleaned and could see him. _Someone else’s fear is dangerous until they trust you._ Build trust. Get close. 

Freeman was hesitating. 

He kept talking and kept his distance, his hands up and empty. “I can help. I have some medic training.” It wasn’t entirely a lie. “You know you’re bleeding?” 

The suit was talking too, he heard its mechanical voice, faintly feminine, listing off injuries. So it still worked, despite the punishment it had been through. 

He itched to get a look at the housing for its onboard medical diagnostics; a computer system and sensor network that finely calibrated _and_ that impervious to shock, water and corrosion? He wanted it. He just had to get the guy to put the gun down altogether. 

A light tap, a jab with the sedatives in that med kit, let the man’s own trauma do the rest. He’d be better off for a nap, would wake up nice and safe barricaded in the office. By then it would all be over; Black Mesa would have fixed their problem with reality and Johnson would be rich enough to buy a private island. He was doing Freeman a favor, really. That suit was neon orange and it made him a target. Just look at all the bite marks and scratches and- bullets? 

"Look man, you going to trust me or not? You are bleeding on the floor. You're not going to last forever just standing there. Let me help you. You're my best chance at surviving this mess but right now I might be your best chance of surviving the next twenty minutes." 

Freeman seemed to process, then accept this argument. The gun went down. Johnson breathed a little easier. He could just about see that private island. Somewhere warm but not too warm, somewhere without aliens, very far away from underground labyrinthian laboratories. 

The blood was coming from under the back plating, from one of those round little holes with the spiderweb fracture pattern around it. Someone had been shooting. Who? _Doesn’t change anything._

But it did, as did the hiss Freeman made when he touched the back plates. This guy hadn’t just been washed down the sewer pipes, he’d been fighting. And not just aliens. 

_You’re being watched._ He didn’t turn around. Freeman was in front of him, but he felt the ice between his shoulder blades. He hadn’t survived this long without trusting that instinct. “Sorry man, it’s still in there. That must be hell. Listen, I know a little about how these things are put together. I can take off that back plate and get the bullet out for you. There’s no suit repair station in the area, and man alive what have you done to this thing.” 

_You’re being watched._ Back Mesa sweeper, someone else hunting Freeman, some new element of the present chaos? 

He got the back plate off when Freeman gave the go-ahead. Calhoun had been right; this guy wasn’t much of a talker. 

But he was a thinker, apparently, and had instincts on par with Johnson’s. The gun sat level with his belly button, three inches from the narrow gap between body armor plates in the vest. What had Freeman guessed, the spy part or the part where Johnson was planning to walk away with the suit or had he just been shot at too many times already? _Maybe he’s trying to steal the suit too._ “Come on, Freeman. Either trust me or shoot me but make a decision.” 

That glare. That was good glare, as good as anything Jerome leveled at him, as loaded as the handgun. 

_You’re being watched._ Pinned now between two people who saw right through him. _Don’t look over your shoulder._ The eyes on his back just as dangerous as the gun in his gut. 

When in doubt, lie. The playbook was clear on that point. Never, ever tell the truth. The truth is always worse than the dumbest lie you can come up with. _County sanitation inspector, we had a report of expired toilet gaskets. OSHA health & safety review board representative here about the reverse-alphabetized data sheets. I'm looking for Joe Schmali to serve a lawsuit from PETA; they got caught on camera wearing a live kitten. Doughnut delivery in memory of Marcellia. What do you mean you don't know her, she just died last week! _

“Fine. Yes, I’m corporate. I know about the suit. Till all this happened I was angling for a piece of it myself.” _Stop talking,_ his brain said, but instinct said otherwise. Instinct said _the truth is all you have now and this man is a lot smarter than you are and will lose nothing by killing you._ “Got a big paycheck back home at Horizon Labs if I bring in some of that self-healing energized nanotech.” 

Freeman clearly wasn’t surprised. 

Johnson drew a breath. “But listen man, Black Mesa’s broken and if you die, my chances are about zero.” He surprised himself; that wasn’t a lie. “I keep you alive, you bring me and that fancy suit back to my place, and we’ll treat you better than this hellhole ever did.” Not that he had any authority to make promises on Horizon’s behalf, but he felt he had a pretty good read on Horizon’s modus operandi. And they were better to their people than Black Mesa. 

_You’re being watched._ Did Freeman have a partner? An enemy? Whoever it was he wanted them gone. 

Freeman’s face relaxed. The glare slid off and his focus landed somewhere on the far wall, the gun was on the table. Loaded, between them, unguarded. 

_You’re being watched._

_I know, I know, shut up about it. I have to focus._ He left the gun alone. 

Getting the back panel off was tricky enough; he’d seen it done, but the catch for disengaging the hinge plates wasn’t designed to come easily. And Freeman, silent as he was, was very clearly being hurt by everything Johnson was doing. He kept talking, mostly nonsense, anything to fill the silence and keep focus. 

He could just keep disassembling it. _Pick up the gun. Take the suit._

_You’re being watched._

The man’s skin was off-color, bruised and slick, cold to the touch. Trembling. The bullet was meshed in a ring of inflamed scar tissue, surrounded by several inches of dark subcutaneous bleeding, and it wasn’t the only mark. 

Just what was this guy doing, trying to fight the whole alien invasion all by himself? 

Johnson was not a connoisseur of used bullets but he’d seen plenty, and stolen a few, and he very much doubted the squashed copper slug had come from a company-issue firearm. 

Seemed the laws of physics and the next-door neighbors weren’t the only ones unhappy with today’s performance. Whoever was trying to kill Freeman had botched the job. There were bite scars too, and what looked a lot like claw marks. He touched the long gash, raw with overgrown scarring. Freeman flinched. 

“Oh sorry, I didn't think.” And he hadn’t. He knew exactly what was in the med boxes, because Horizon had already reverse-engineered the cocktail of drugs, hormones and steroids, and decided not to get within a mile of the stuff. And no one in Black Mesa used them either. 

Except Freeman, except today. 

The man was quickly shifting from _mark_ to _rival_ to _coworker_ in his mind; all the lies he’d rattled off to get this close were suddenly becoming less untrue. 

He got the bullet out. 

Antibiotics or sedative? Point of no return. _You’re being watched._

_You’re going to drown. Sharks in the waters. Black Mesa doesn’t care about you. You’re going to die alone like all the other spies, never see Jerome again, never sell your formulas or pick up that Horizon paycheck. You can’t fight this beast. You’ll be a name scraped off a locker by this time next week. You can’t steal back your own life._

_But maybe he can._

He slid the needle under the skin and pressed down with slow firm pressure. 

“Stay alive for me. I’ll be hereabouts when this is all mopped up.” 

Freeman looked at him, an unreadable expression through the glasses. Offered his hand. 

Johnson took it. Something about lions and thorns, or just about not overreaching himself the way the rest of the facility so clearly had. Or about not angering the third person in the room, Freeman’s own personal shark. Or about wanting to look Jerome in the eye when he told him he hadn’t condemned a brilliant man to a lonely death. 

_Go do whatever it is you’re hell-bent on doing and don’t make me regret letting you walk away._

  


\---

  


He waited as long as he could, then he started moving. Rat in a maze, working his way through the shadow labyrinth, through places not meant for lowly security guards like him. 

The sewers should have emptied out into a desert canyon somewhere, quietly dumping their hazards out to poison the coyotes, but that end of Black Mesa had been swallowed by newer development and he had to climb again. 

And descend. And climb. Until locked doors stopped him, and realization sank in. 

However Freeman had escaped it wasn’t a path he could follow. He was trapped. 

Alone. No watcher now, no dangerous regard. 

He grew hungry. He slept on corrugated steel, at the last locked door. Watched the battery in his phone dwindle and die. 

Thought of Jerome and how much he was sorry for not walking away weeks ago, when Jerome first told him to. 

Sat in the dark and listened to the things in the walls going about their business. 

Wondered if he’d notice when he became a monster and started eating the dead. 

Couldn’t decide if it was good or bad to be out of bullets. 

  


\---

  


The little creatures made a scratching noise. The alien-zombies shuffled, tripped and moaned. The multilegged ones had a strange loping gait and talked amongst themselves, and the ones that spat acid sounded like a rusty door hinge. 

None of them sounded like booted feet, heavy feet, keys on a key ring and a bouncing flashlight. None of them yelled his name. 

“You in here? Hey! Johnson! Hey! Sound off, man. Don’t be dead!” 

“I’m here,” he whispered. Then took a breath, and swallowed the dryness in his throat and yelled. “Here!” 

Chambers, red-faced, pouring sweat, mustache bristled and hair in wild disarray, looking ghastly in the glow of his flashlight. He bent over, hands on his knees, panting and dripping. “You have no idea,” he panted. “No idea. I have been looking for you for hours. You might have to carry me out. Freeman said.” He stopped for breath. “Sewers. Go get Johnson out of the sewers. So I went.” He wiped his face and dried his hand on his trouser leg. “And it’s ten floors down a ladder to just get to the top of the sewers! You had better be alive, partner. I did not come all this way to get a heart attack for a ghost.” 

Johnson had been pulled out of a few tight places before but this was by far the worst. 

Freeman had come through after all. 

“Where is he?” he asked Chambers. 

“I don’t know. He got to Lambda alright. I didn’t even know we had a place called Lambda. Did you know they have a rocket? After the military showed up and started killing everyone, word went out to all the security guards to get a move-on and help Freeman get to Lambda because he had that fancy suit on and could maybe fix everything. And then he went to ‘the other side,’ wherever that is, and someone radioed and said Freeman said to go get you out of the sewer. I didn’t know you knew the guy.” 

“I don’t.” They climbed back up out of the sewer, through the overflow drain Chambers had come in by. He’d gotten a set of old-fashioned master facility keys from somewhere and suddenly all doors were open to them. 

It was night, the desert cold and loud, sky hazy with smoke and fireglow. 

“What day is it?” he asked. 

There was a chance, a small, distant chance. 

“Give me your phone.” 

“Company policy says no phones on work time.” 

“You want to get out of here? Hand it over, man. HR has other things to worry about. Thanks. If this works, I’ll owe you a whole box of doughnuts.” 

  


\---

  


_“Stay put, I see you.”_

Johnson waved anyway. Chambers waved both hands and his flashlight. 

The helicopter was a narrow, sleek thing, pale desert camouflage with an orange chevron across the tail; looked like Jerusalem got tired of waiting around for their fuel formula. 

It contained a very angry, very relieved Jerome, and enough space for Chambers. 

They were somewhere over southern Utah when the penny dropped and Chambers realized what it all meant (and took confused offense to rescuing and then being rescued by a spy,) but then an iron glow lit the sky behind them and the mushroom cloud cast a shadow in the dawn. 

Johnson doubted there were any private islands in his future but he and Jerome (and Chambers) were alive, with immediate protection assured by two very skilled pilots in a military helicopter. Maybe somewhere Freeman was too, his shark still circling. Safe from the blast on that ‘other side,’ past reality’s doorstep. 

He hoped so. 

Spies weren’t supposed to be memorable but physicists in hazard suits didn’t have that restriction. 

_Stay alive for me._

  
  



End file.
